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Hello and welcome to this forum!
Your sleep problem is a very common and classic one. Almost every insomniac’s nightmare started like this.
The root of every insomnia is almost always the overthinking, overdoing and over-catastrophizing over lack of sleep. I and many others are here to tell you there’s nothing wrong with the occasional sleepless night or with your sleep system. Believing there’s a problem when there’s actually none is the main problem.
Keep your sleeping hours regular, get out and into bed at the same time every night. This is the core of cbti and the most practical step to get out of insomnia. Be very patient, disciplined and super compassionate on yourself. Because this will take some time to get back to normal. How long will depend on your personality and patience. Remember nobody is judging your sleep except yourself. Never measure success or failure based on just one night. One poor night never means your future nights are doomed, on the contrary, after poor sleep, it means good sleep is always just around the corner. Because these polar opposites are connected together and form opposite sides of the same coin.
The other aspect is the mental part, which is the fear and over-catastrophizing. Try to remind yourself these are only thoughts and don’t shut them out. Allow them to form in the mind and experiment with yourself to see if they’re really true. As you get better, most people will start growing out of them. Then they just don’t bother you anymore because there’s no shred of truth in them at all. All this fear has been a hoax all along.
Toward the end of your recovery, try to see that true recovery is never about getting good sleep every night. It is your response and mindset to poor nights. If bad nights happen, which they almost always do occasionally, but you’re no longer bothered at all, not compelled to ask many questions and try to seek quick fixes, or actively try to avoid them, then congratulations, you’re cured! True recovery is not living in fear of poor sleep. Good luck.
The bottomline is perfect sleep isn’t the cure. A change in mindset is. Ultimately, you want to reach a stage where you don’t lose sleep over sleep anymore, or couldn’t be bothered even if you did. You’ve become indifferent to a night of poor sleep and it doesn’t register in your mind that something is wrong or needed fixing. And you just know, from experience, constantly asking questions or actively seeking quick fixes, is probably futile and only distracts you from enjoying your life in the present moment. Good luck!
Hello and welcome to the forum @smueller1117!
When you’re recovered, you will realize those ‘big scary men with masks’ are really just a set of your own thoughts. You have been frightened by your own thoughts all this while, did you say, for 27 years?
Hello @Winston!
Unfortunately nothing here constitutes a permanent cure for insomnia. Because there is none! Nobody, including Martin himself, is claiming once you are sleeping well or continue to do cbti religiously, sleepless nights will never happen to you again. Such a claim would be an outrageous and outright lie. If you can’t sleep, then it means just that, you can’t sleep for that particular night only. It doesn’t mean your future nights are doomed. No further explanation is needed and it is pointless searching for one because it only makes you miserable dwelling on the past and continue living in fear for the future.Perhaps what you need is a change in mindset and attitude. Try to forget about your past and begin every night on a fresh page with no expectation or attachment to any outcome. Continue to wake up at the same time every day, go on your business as usual (you may find you can be just as productive) and going to bed at the same time. That’s really all you can do, the rest is up to your body. Good luck.
Hello! You are free to go back to bed anytime as long as it’s within your sleep window. Good luck!
Hello! It doesn’t really matter what you choose to do with your thoughts. But it’s important to attach lesser and lesser meaning to them as time goes on. Suppose you drive every day, and your mind gives you thoughts like ‘you might get into an accident today’ or ‘you’ll be injured’, how do you see them? Do you take them seriously, avoid driving for that day and just stay at home? Or do you accept them as just mindless noise and still go out driving regardless? Thoughts about sleep or practically anything are the same. They are harmless and have no influence on the outcome. Thoughts are just a reminder of things that could happen but don’t necessarily will. In fact, most of the time, they don’t happen. It’s how you view them that’s important. When your sleep starts improving until you sleep great almost every night, will sleep thoughts still bother you? Probably not, because you won’t take them as seriously anymore. Good luck!
Hi @MaggieMae
Hello and welcome to this forum. I believe the minimum sw should be around 6 hours. It doesn’t matter if your nightly average is less than this, you always start with 6 hours. A common mistake is to start too short, then people find it’s impossible to keep to (kinda like restricting yourself to just 800 calories a day on a diet), or the enormous pressure they put themselves to sleep within that short window that makes it much more stressful and counter-productive. Hope you find this useful. Your best sleep happens when you are super easy-going about it, not feel pressured at all and just believe your body will allow it happen naturally. In other words, no longer using a sw. Good luck!
Hello! Be willing to entertain thoughts of nights with zero sleep. Instead of trying to shut them out or escaping. This means you become more willing to listen to your overprotective mind, which is just trying to protect you. If you try to shut it out, it amplifies the urgency, ups the alert levels and you end up with alarm bells going off everywhere in your body in the form of panic and anxiety attacks.
Maybe spend some time quietly every day just to acknowledge your thoughts and what your mind is trying to warn you about. Tell yourself it is okay to feel this way and indeed very natural and human. But try to accept that nothing controls sleep. It is a biological process that happens after being awake long enough. In the same way you get hungrier or feel the urge to inhale the longer you go without food or breathing.
Try to imagine what a senario with zero sleep entails. This means different things to different people. It may mean poor work performance, feeling lethargic, low energy levels, foggy mind or whatever. Be willing to experience all these, in fact expect them to happen. So then what’s the big deal? You will still get through the day regardless. A night or two of no sleep won’t hurt or damage you in any way. Remember the longer you go without sleep, the likelier you will sleep because of all that sleep debt getting built up. This is the ultimate truth about sleeping.
When you then come out of the ‘other side’ from this experience, you begin seeing what insomnia is all about. Just a set of thoughts and how you relate to them. Thoughts can’t control sleep either! So all this has nothing to do with your innate ability to sleep. Basically you were just frightened by your own thoughts. Good luck!
Hello! The logical thing to do would be to first treat the underlying illness causing discomfort and pain. So you need to seek professional medical treatment. Your sleep would probably take care of itself, just get into and out of bed at regular times. Other than that, nobody here can offer any further help. Good luck!
The key to overcoming insomnia is always your mindset. It’s not the constantly tinkering around the SW because yes, you can continue on your SW and this won’t affect your future sleep at all or endlessly asking questions on what to do. It’s not caring how you slept anymore. If you could forget or ignore your problem, then it isn’t there anymore. Sleeping 1 or 8 hours doesn’t bother you at all and you stop catastrophizing about future sleep. Good luck and best wishes!
Hello! I think you are overthinking things. Sleep is supposed to be simple, there is no need to complicate it further by relentlessly asking whether you should be doing x,y,z. Just set a 6 hour sleep window at pretty consistent hours and let your body do the rest. While acknowledging that you might not fall sleep quickly every night and that’s okay! You might have to do SR or you could just rest quietly in bed. Either way is fine. Daniel also has a book called Set it and Forget it, which is basically saying the same thing. Try not to get caught up in the finer details or believe you have to do everything perfectly to succeed because the reality about sleep isn’t like that. Regularity is the key to pretty consistent nights. Good luck.
Sorry for sounding harsh. And I have got plenty of admonishment here over it too. But sometimes, this is exactly what the situation needs. A good smackdown. It’s kinda like telling a child there’s no monsters in the closet and to get back to bed! Insomnia is an adult version of that. It might not make much sense now but as you travel along this journey and things start becoming clearer, you will see what I’m talking about. I and many others have been through this before. And I know there’s really nothing there (to be afraid of). Yes the suffering is real but the things that ’caused’ it are completely harmless. Insomnia and thoughts can never hurt you unless you take them too seriously. Just set a timetable for bed and that’s it. You get into bed at X hours and out at Y and you don’t care what happens in between. If you can’t sleep between X and Y, you have a choice to lie in bed resting peacefully or get up and do something you enjoy. Both are okay, the idea is to be okay and not struggle with night time wakefulness. Good luck!
Hello! I think you have to find that balance yourself. But the good news is most people will eventually reach some kind of ‘settlement’ with your mind over what kind of a relationship you want to have with sleep. Many people who recovered like myself tends to put it further and further down the list of priority as they get better. Yes sleep is essential but we still have to live in the moment, yes? We all have other things to take care of. For you now, it might be a new relationship, work, assignments or whatever. But if you continue to choose to engage in this futile exercise, other things will start popping up that your mind thinks will disrupt your sleep, things like marriage, moving into a new home, having kids and blah blah blah. That list will be endless and contains a million things! How are you gonna to entertain all that? Can’t you see how futile this is? Your mind is playing tricks with you and you are falling into it. So when is this nonsense going to stop? Well it won’t stop because you just can’t let it go! You are feeding your insomnia with your attention and making decisions based on how they affect your sleep. My advice is, sleep with your boyfriend now, get used to it here and now. Stop avoiding things because sleep and start being brave. Only then will you be free from the struggles which is entirely self imposed. Good luck! Dismantle the fear around poor sleep and you begin realizing what insomnia is really all about. Just a set of thoughts and how you relate to them. Good luck!
It seems you have made sleep the centre of attention for everything that you live for. And that’s an issue because it doesn’t have to be that way and it’s all entirely made up by your overprotective mind. Maybe you need to ask yourself, what is it about losing sleep that I’m so afraid of, that I can’t continue to enjoy my life to the fullest without. The reality is that sleep doesn’t define who you are or what you are capable of. There will be a time when everyone sleeps eternally, so perhaps ask yourself why you need to be missing it so badly now already? Is sleep really that important compared to what’s going on in your life? How you use your time is really the issue here. So you can spend way more time in bed trying to sleep, or would you rather like to go out and do the things that you really want and enjoy. At the end, how do you want to remember your life? How you slept or how you lived? The choice is entirely yours. Best wishes.
Stare down deep inside you and ask what is it you are so afraid of? If your “mind still intrudes with, you’re just doing that to make me go away.” Well, does it have to go away? Allow yourself to have intrusions but you can also choose how you respond to them. If you are not bothered to take any action and you attach less and less meaning to them, then thoughts don’t matter to you regardless of where they reside. Your body has demonstrated it can sleep, almost every night. The proof is already there! What else do you need? So what if you can’t sleep for a night or two? Life still goes on and sleep will eventually return, it always has. Accept thoughts as just mind noise, they mean absolutely nothing unless you take them way too seriously.
